Grrl Power #1337 – Nothing to 533 here
Hey look! I figured out a way to do art quicker that didn’t involve stick figures! Hah hah, well, I managed to amuse myself, anyway. Don’t worry, this gag only runs for two pages. Man, it was so hard to stop myself from putting the eyeball hot-spots in to show that eyes are wet and specular. Not that you’d actually be able to see Scooby-Doo style eyeballs in the dark anyway, but there certainly wouldn’t be a light source to cast those hots. Ignore the fact that there are eyelid shadows on the eyes, please.
So, I planned poorly. It’s page 1337 and nothing “leet” like hacking or uh, playing video games well or anything like that is on the page. Man, you guys remember when everything was 1337? That lasted like… 4 years? Maybe 6? Memory is weird. Leet-speak felt like an age of its own, and maybe it did last for 12 or 30 years, but its heyday was decidedly shorter than that. And then one day, everyone just kind of stopped transposing letters and numbers. At least publicly. I’m sure most of us have a few “P@$$w0r|)$” with internumerals still. Anyway, memory being weird with time is why everyone goes, “Abwaaaah?” when they learned that (insert movie here) came out 26 years ago! Movies have that special power to kind of live forever in our heads, and unless a particular movie is some sort of childhood keystone, I think everyone feels like every movie they saw after the age of about 16 came out roughly 7 years ago. The Matrix came out 26 years ago! God, you remember how every movie for like 5 years after that had to have a orbiting bullet time camera effect in it?
Maxima respects cops. In theory. We have a saying in America, “Ignorance of the law is not an excuse. Unless you’re a cop.” The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that cops don’t need to know the law to enforce it. Or… what they think might be the law, I guess. Basically, “a police officer’s reasonable mistake of law can provide the individualized suspicion required by the 4th Amendment to justify a traffic stop.” Which sounds like a real thin-edge of the wedge ruling to me. But cops in the U.S. receive on average two and a half months of training, and are only required to have a G.E.D. or high school diploma (though this can vary quite a bit from state to state), whereas cops in lots of other countries need a college degree and receive 18-36 months of training. So what was the Supreme Court to do? Suddenly require cops to actually know what they’re doing? In America? Get out of here.
So Maxima does theoretically respect cops, but it can be hard to maintain that optimism in the face of a lot of real world realities. Arc-SWAT is a military force with civilian law enforcement duties. She honestly considers her team elites the of law enforcement, and not just because of their powers. Of course, that said, not everyone on Arc-SWAT does have a college degree. Jabberwokky doesn’t. Heatwave has 2 years of community college under her belt. I’m… not sure if I ever said where Sydney is in her education. I feel like up until her induction into the team, she was doing like 1-2 community college classes a semester, working on transferable credits, though she had no particular major in mind and wasn’t real gung-ho about it. But she had to drop the classes she was taking when she joined the team, because a lot of her non-superhero time is now being taken up with law enforcement and legal education classes.
I’m going to try something with this new vote incentive.
This month, I’m closing on a new house, selling my Mom’s house, finishing packing Mom’s house, moving city to city to the new house, forwarding mail, canceling utilities, all that. And after that’s done, I get to start the process of selling my old house, which needs a little work before it can realistically go on the market.
SO. I’m going to try and do this vote incentive in stages. Currently it’s just pencils. The TopWebcomics one will update with colors and detail until we get to the no clothes versions, then that will continue over at Patreon. Also there will be a comic or two in between each version to fill out the story.
I know it’s hard to tell from just the pencils, but this is Heatwave and Jiggawatt. The comics will explain why they’re doing what they’re doing. Although I feel like even saying that much makes it easy to guess, but hopefully the journey will still amuse.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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OK…hear me out but what if the next fight sequence was produced like this? but interrupted with flashing lights as various beams or globes get shot around.
I remember a gag page in Marvel’s What If? in the 1980s. The top half was all white and the bottom half was all black with no details visible. The caption on the top was along the lines of “Snowbird and Moon Knight fighting Windego during a blizzard.” The lower panel had a caption that reads, “Cloak and Black Panther fighting Shade in an unlit room during a blackout.
Samurai Jack had a fight sequence like that. Or very similar. He was dressed all in white, while his opponent was completely in black. The environment was either solid white or solid black, giving one or the other the advantage at the time. Was a pretty cool fight sequence
I remember that one.
He was fighting a black-clad ‘Ninja’ in an old rickety tower as the sun set.
The Ninja was using the expanding shadows to hide and attack from.
Jack had been trained by a master Shinobi who taught him to hide in the light while clad in white.
Jack did cool stuff like that all the time.
It is entirely possible that one actually advantage to having been largely disconnected from pop culture for most of my childhood, is that I never feel “old.” I don’t even feel that much out-of-sync…I still like the kind of stuff I liked as a kid, I guess. Looking back just the last 25 years…yeah, no, the same nerdy kid stuff. Be it 80’s retro, or newer iterations, my interests haven’t changed much, and I never find myself feeling like, “I’m too old for his.” ^_^’
I have the sneaking suspicion that the generations before us (well, I’m a Millenial) felt remarkably similar, they just didn’t have the same amount of tech gadget to gauge it with.
(GenX enters the chat, munching on pork rinds and actively dipping them in salsa) mmm, yeah. I guess maybe, I dunno. Don’t do the cargo shorts and Op t-shirt thing. Now it’s whatever shirt is on sale, but the cargo pockets are now on my kilt. Which is way better than the way things used to be…now, time to fix these pumps for the boss’s lava moat in the central chamber. (hobbles off in a spry GenX that had the kind of active life that is full of regrets but had fun doing it all) (over the shoulder) oh and as far as that whole WWIII thing? Yeah, two things. One it’s WWI phase three and yer on yer own kid, but you might want to get some poptarts and learn to eat them without electricity.
Eh, I’m on the tail end of GenX and I’ll still wear cargo shorts or pants as I please, the pockets are too convenient and I don’t feel obligated to please the fashion sense of someone else especially if they are not paying my bills.
I also have plain black “dad” sketchers and my comfort is chief there too for similar reasons.
And the only thing making me feel old is my older family members dying and my back hurting. Everything else has been largely the same to me for decades now.
Don’y say Gendarme without precision say rather National Gendarmerie Intervention Group or in French GIGN – Groupe d’intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale – it’s more like her job , and the training and selection process is at the seals level.
Gendarmerie range from the rural cop to the GIGN.
The GIGN is a specific French group, while Gendarmes is the term for paramilitary police used in most French-speaking countries. Other countries have similar organisations that are national law enforcement that are a wing of the military.
You also have organisations like the RCMP that are called Gendarmerie in French (Gendarmerie royale du Canada) because they traditionally have either some form of military functions, a military status, or both as in the case of the RCMP (they are also a Regiment of Dragoons).
Well, at least with someone who can actually see in that low light, there’s no one likely to be eaten by a grue.
I guess it makes sense that Max can’t see in the dark. She doesn’t have a perception section of power to pool into. So maybe at best she gets a tangential clarity/movement tracking increase the higher her speed gets.
Also, people sure do love to go on tangents when Maxima is asking serious questions—seriously good questions, too, compared to confronting the person she suspects based on one weird conversation.
7RU3 1337 |\|3\/3R D13S
An interesting point of view could be langage spoken by each the member of arc team…
Maxima I think Spanish, and modern Standard Arabic if y recal correctly
Anvil shes’ american an she had a college degree , spanish probably , French no , if she is from upper classes and she’s born 28 years ago in 2008 (1980) perhaps German …
Someone with an interesting collection of langages could be Ingsol ( 700 years but from where ? European, Byzantine ? The fall of Constantinople is in 1453 – if he was already a vampire at this date – .
Latin is obviously in the langage understood by Ingsol … And potenficies in ancien Greek, perhaps also modern one and Turk are likely if he cames from Byzantine empire, Arab also.
Been awhile since we heard from Crimson, but who are those others with her?
And she was very bummed out during the meeting. She started her entire questioning about dungeons by talking about being turned into a wererabbit of all things.
Why would Max speak Spanish? I suppose she learned Arabic in the military?
Anvil, I’d always envisaged her as some sort of Cajun or Creole, speaking American English and Louisiana French.
In Texas it’s pretty handy to speak Spanish due proximity to Mexico and it’s the most spoken foreign langage in US – in 2020 42.03 million of US residents speak Spanish at home -.
And t it’s an handy langage in America , central america and the majority of south america have Spanish as official langage, only Brazil speak Portuguese …
For me a french born and breed Maxima as not any cajun or acadien vibe… and cajun french is in verge of disparition.
Cajun French is intelligible for me a French native speaker born in France.
Archon is located in the lone star state ..
Heatwave would sound like Gretchen Wilson or maybe Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs. Some sort of “cracker” anyway.
Math sounds sort-of English. Like Hugh Laurie in “House”.
Do we know where Sydney is from?
Hugh Laurie’s American accent in House was so good many in the US couldn’t believe he was actually English.
At least at first.
For me, Math sounds somewhat like Stifler out of American Pie.
Peggy is some sort of country girl, but with a learned accent to cover it.
The Colonel (General? I forget) sounds like a late-career Tom Hanks.
Jabberwokky sounds like she has escaped from Top Cat.
Those black-out gags are old news. One of the Tex Avery-era Looney Tunes (Screwy Squirrel?) has the character in the dark. There is a tremendous crash, and they say “gee, that was a funny gag; too bad you couldn’t see it!”
To be honest, nothing in Kat’s characterization so far impressed me as her being especially clever, esp. for the standards of an elite supernatural enforcer group such as Semper Vigilantis, the top 10% nonetheless. She seems no Krona material. I even struggle to see her as top decile for the much less rigorous standards of mundane cops, which aren’t that great to begin with. In my country we often make jokes of our gendarmerie not being the sharpest knifes in the drawer. Maybe if we assume Keystone Cops as the standard.
So all of this comes to me as an Informed Attribute used for here for the sake of plot railroading. Nothing must get in the way of the Outing Sciona high-speed train.
By the way, Kat might even have noticed the aide in passing. The main issue is, unless she is blessed with exceptional memory (which would be another Informed Attribute), she would have no good reason to remember her months after the fact. She did not spoke the aide, who stayed in the background, and there were much more memorable participants to a discussion on much more interesting tropes. Having a tattoo is not that noteworthy.
Kat did not speak to the aide, nor did the aide speak to her. The aide did not speak at all during the actual meeting and was in the background instead while the senator spoke. And Kat seemed focused mostly on the sandwiches and how she was new to all this because she recently got turned into a wererabbit (of all things – her word because she is still annoyed about it) against her will.
She also hasnt been that observant in other cases, like where she JUST kicked that cement mixer and almost hit someone else with it because she wasn’t paying attention since she was angry about her predicament.
Nothing about her her has struck me as being particularly observant, at least not currently since she’s still in that ‘why did this happen to me’ lamenting phase.
Dave, do they call them Pork Scratchings there? I had to Google it to check my guess, but I’ve never seen/heard that before. Amusingly, I am familiar with the alternatives. “Pork scratchings are also known as pork crackling, chicharrones, or pork rinds.”